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Alice Stewart represented a modern master class in how to maintain sincere beliefs without surrender or conflict. The Republican strategist respected cynics and critics enough to speak out, not mock. As fierce as she could be as an advocate and as shrewd as anyone as a strategist, she also had qualities that have become very rare in politics: she was unfailingly typeunflinchingly generous and hopelessly decent, even when it was obvious that she and her training partner would never see things the same way.
As Washington pauses to remember Stewart, who he died unexpectedly on Saturday, at age 58, his professional acumen is the most notable element in tributes, but for those of us who covered his campaigns, the loss means so much more. Stewart was, quite simply, one of the best in the business, capable of working both the journalistic side of a story and the operational side with the same rigor and honesty. She was always aboutbut never insincere.
A long-distance runner and CNN commentator, Stewart may have been the most reliable conservative communicator of his era. While others in his orbit chased memes and viral moments, Stewart advised candidates and causes to work with proven facts and case studies. While populist outrage has fueled much of the Republican landscape dating back to the 1994 Republican Revolution, Stewart has gently nudged the Republican Party to appeal to the apolitical middle-class voters who actually decide most elections.
Consider the remarkable track record she has built in presidential politics after a successful career as a television producer, reporter and anchor. In 2008, Stewart guided a lesser-known southern governor, homeschooler favorite movement for a serious contender for the White House. In the 2012 cycle, she picked a Tea Party favorite and helped her win — admittedly at a tremendous cost to donors and the institution itself – one of the first test vote in Iowa. After the bid fell through, Stewart joined joined the more reliably conservative left in those 2012 primaries, helping a former senator who lost her re-election by 17 points emerges as a potential front-runner in 2016. And when it became clear that Stewart’s Republican Party had misjudged the threat of a New York reality TV star in 2016, she articulated from his first big boss in politics to a firebrand troublemaker from Texas, as an effort to ensure that true conservative views were part of the debate.
And through it all — the long days, the difficult news cycles, the unlikely odds and the troubled candidacies themselves — she has maintained a calm demeanor that is a rarity in campaign orbits. In a high-pressure world of presidential campaigns, her arrival brought some stability to the traveling roadshows and professionalism to the exhausted and arrogant candidates. While most aides, somewhere along the way, came to believe that yelling would bring solutions to difficult times and that bullying could smooth out bad stories, Stewart started more gently — often with a text or email. mail asking when a good time could be found to talk – and then methodically outline the problems she had with a story and ask to perhaps include more perspectives next time. She was tough but never toxic. Sure, she was playing the long game, but she also really enjoyed her role as a front-line liaison for some of America’s biggest newsrooms.
While she never shied away from the far-right cheerleaders of the Republican Party’s activist class, she also preached that politics is a game of addition, and if you don’t add new voters to a cause, you’re losing. No one would ever call her a “squish,” but she didn’t pick fights unless there was a clearly defined victory and a path to get there. Feelings did not replace position on the field. Orthodoxy did not change the vote count. Within campaigns, even her nominal bosses often turned to her as the last voice in the room for an opinion; if Stewart said something was a bad idea and wouldn’t please the press – and therefore the wider public – then maybe that SlideDeck would be worth taking a second look at.
So when news broke about Stewart, the political press, the communications veterans who worked alongside her and the next generation of agents she trained, everyone was surprised.
Consider this episode from the 2012 campaign. Even by Iowa standards in December, the week leading up to Christmas 2011 was especially difficult. Wind gusts in some parts of the state reached 60 kilometers per hour. Visibility was rubbish, a foot of snow was falling on the highways and back roads, and it was nearly impossible to get readers—or editors—to care about what we were seeing.
Put as plainly as possible: The campaign reporters following Rep. Michele Bachmann’s 10-day trip through 99 Iowa counties were pretty glum. Bachmann’s exhausted staff and volunteers weren’t much better off, apparently rushing between photo shoots that lasted, in some cases, less than 10 minutes for 100 people. Everything seemed pointless and it is in these moments that groupthink can doom a candidate. But a strain of optimism stood out for those of us chasing Bachmann, once a rising star in the Tea Party-fueled Republican Party, but someone whose sizzle seemed to simmer and then fall as she progressed from her first-place finish in the Iowa Straw . Research months in advance.
Stewart saw what was happening and knew that a moral problem could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. She saw it in Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s mammoth campaign, which exploded four years earlier when the last dollars were burned on jet fuel they couldn’t afford. Stewart turned to the most humanizing accessory available for any campaign: a dog. Her Shih Tzu called Samantha, with a lack of manpower for Sam, joined the bus ride and provided what we now call therapy dog services to journalists, staff, volunteers and even members of the Bachmann family who crowded into crowded diners and rural stores to watch the candidate repeat the same script over and over to a cameraman . Made to long days with little new material to hang a daily story.
However, when Stewart briefed reporters on the daily schedule and talking points, she often held the puppy in her arms. Sam herself wasn’t good for quotes, but she was a useful reminder that Stewart, like the reporters, was a human being on the other side of the campaign industrial complex. As easy and convenient as it may have been to vent about a campaign, it is much more difficult to despise a real-life person, especially when the person there is a model of empathy.
Of course, a puppy alone can’t change political forces in Iowa — or nationally, for that matter. But it was a moment of solid instinct that discouraged many reporters who were Bachmann’s best hope for getting his message out. Even when Bachmann’s security team brigade with journalists who got too close or It appeared as threats to the only woman in the race, Stewart and her dog managed to defuse high-tension moments.
And that was Stewart’s superpower: In a powder keg environment, she not only brought calm to almost any situation, she did it through her authenticity, even in the most manufactured environments. A consummate professional, she deserved all the goodwill the reporters had for her, all the belief that she was doing her best to be on point, even in cases where complete honesty might not have been the best option for her candidate or cause.
On the road, there were times when she saved many journalists with simple acts of decency. When she could, she would order extra snacks in case we had missed a meal or two or three trying to keep up with her candidate. On the days when one of her candidates managed to pull up to the door of an auditorium and park-while the rest of us didn’t dare risk a tow with such VIP behavior-Stewart had his recorder running and a complete audio recording available in its entirety to anyone who was late. And here’s what stands out: most of us had no reason to question the veracity of these files; Stewart was, at her core, one of us and as committed to the facts as ever. Furthermore, she understood that cutting corners and hoping no one found out was a recipe for disaster.
Outside of White House runs, Stewart was a crisis manager for troubled House and Senate candidates, writing strategic memos to rescue the scandal. of the day or turn tough love into a spiraling campaign. Occasionally, she intervened when relations between campaign headquarters and national political reporters became testy. She was an anonymous fixer for second-tier candidates and the face of first-tier candidates when the consequences were as high as they could be for her conservative colleagues.
On a selfish level, I always enjoyed my conversations—in church lobbies, in hotel parking lots, on friends’ rooftops—with Stewart because, inevitably, I would learn something new or discover a slightly newer way of looking at a situation. She was partisan, but not blind. Stewart worked against Trump’s nomination during the primaries as Sen. Ted Cruz’s chief communicator, but never it fell in the NeverTrump category after Cruz disappeared. She voted for Trump when he was on the ballot, but told anyone who asked that she didn’t lose her sense of right and wrong, much less her forged common sense, to do so. She just chose from the available options and couldn’t find common ground with Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. And, in the interval between his almost constant appearances on CNN and his work teaching As a new generation of conservatives—especially women—like talking politics, she often channeled Huckabee’s all-too-common assertion that she was conservative but not angry about it. It was a good antidote to the Trump era, and whose departure will leave our politics in need.
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